All posts tagged air safety

Airline pilots are trained for a vast range of emergencies, but almost nothing could have prepared the crew of a Lion Air domestic flight for what they saw on the runway just moments after touchdown at the Gorontalo airport in Indonesia Tuesday night — a herd of cows.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The aircraft — a Boeing 737 twinjet operating as Lion flight 892 — originated from Jakarta with 110 passengers and collided with at least one of the cows on the runway, damaging its landing gear and brakes. The plane then veered off the runway and its front wheels came to rest on soft mud.

Two passengers were slightly injured as they evacuated from the plane. They were able to leave hospital after treatment, according to Lion Air’s spokesman Leithen Francis. One cow, however, was killed. Read More »

Indonesian authorities removed the cockpit voice recorder from the wreckage of the Lion Air jet that crashed into water off Bali’s airport, an airport spokesman said Tuesday.

“The [recorder] has been brought to Jakarta by the [transportation safety authorities] for investigation,” Mr. Alfasyah told The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Alfasyah goes by one name, which is common in Indonesia.

The plane broke into two pieces on Saturday when it hit the water. The 101 passengers and seven crew survived. The cause of the crash isn’t known, but the voice recorder, obtained from the wreckage late Monday, will help in determining it. Read More »

The crash landing of a Lion Air Boeing 737-800 in the bay near Bali’s main airport on Saturday offered a rare example where passengers walked away from a commercial jetliner without fatal injuries after a water ditching.

AP

Large commercial aircraft aren’t designed for landings into water.

The only other “successful” jetliner water ditching attempt over the last two decades also took place on Indonesian soil. In January 2002, both engines failed mid-flight on a Garuda Indonesia Boeing 737-300 that was en-route to the city of Yogyakarta from the tourist island of Lombok. The pilots were forced to ditch the plane into the Bengawan Solo River. The landing was also described by experts at the time as a miracle. All of the plane’s 54 passengers survived, though one flight attendant drowned after being swept away by the river current.

The pilot and co-pilot of Lion Air's crashed jet passed their first drug test, but a more rigorous analysis is under way, an Indonesian official said Sunday.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

“We have conducted tests on them on Saturday, with the urine test showing negative results,” Bambang S. Ervan, the spokesman of the Indonesian Public Transportation Ministry, told The Wall Street Journal from Bali's Ngurah Rai Airport.

Mr. Ervan said authorities are still waiting for the results of a test of hair samples to conclude with more certitude that the pilot and co-pilot had no drugs in their systems when they flew the Boeing 737-800 aircraft from West Java's capital of Bandung to the country's most famous resort island Saturday. Read More »

The crash of a Lion Air jet at the resort town of Bali in Indonesia may temporarily help other budget carriers battling in the rapidly growing market, a Credit Suisse official said Sunday.

EPA

“I don't think it will have a serious impact on [Lion's] brand, but it could be a short-term boost for the likes of Citilink and Mandala and — to a lesser extent — AirAsia,” Timothy Ross, the head of Asian-Pacific transport research for Credit Suisse, told The Wall Street Journal on Sunday.

Lion's one month-old Boeing 737-800 jet crashed into shallow waters just off the runway of the main airport on the resort island of Bali on Saturday afternoon. Read More »

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